The only way to explain headstrong resistance to Illinois’ new school choice program is this: Most people who oppose it don’t understand it.

They haven’t done the research on scholarship tax credits, or only selectively. They haven’t studied successful choice models. They are oddly suspicious of faith-based education. They haven’t talked to families fortunate enough to escape failing public schools. They haven’t talked to students on school waiting lists. They haven’t spent time inside chronically underperforming public schools.

They haven’t talked to parents desperate to find safer learning environments for their children.

To those moms and dads they say: Wait for public schools to improve. Just wait. Your child has forever, right? What’s the rush?

Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law Thursday a bill that overhauls the way the state of Illinois pays for education, channeling more resources to property-poor areas of the state. The bill includes a five-year pilot program for tax credit scholarships, which encourage citizens and companies to charitably donate toward tuition programs for low- and middle-income school kids in exchange for a generous income tax break from the state.

Many lawmakers voted against the bill because they oppose school choice, even though they had it themselves. Reps. David Harris, R-Arlington Heights, and Kelly Cassidy and Mary Flowers, both Democrats from Chicago, found the scholarship portion of the bill so offensive, they voted against the whole school funding package.

Harris told his House colleagues he sent his kids to private school. Cassidy sends her kids to private school. Flowers went to Catholic school as a child. The General Assembly is packed with lawmakers who attended private schools and send their kids to private schools.

But they don’t believe in extending that opportunity to poverty-stricken families. Why? They think it would hurt the public school system — the one they didn’t use either.

Let me tell you something: There are Chicago public schools that have failed to properly educate and graduate college-ready students for 40 years, where the hallways are violent, where the administrators are checked out, where the families that could escape already have.

Why would legislators, many of whom describe themselves as progressive Democrats, want to continue protecting institutional failure instead of dropping a lifeline to at least some of the kids who remain at those schools?

There is nothing progressive, or liberal, or inclusive, or equitable about denying low-income families the same opportunities legislators themselves have. That’s called elitism.

Roslind Blasingame-Buford is CEO of LINK Unlimited Scholars, a Chicago-based nonprofit that since 1966 has raised money and established mentorship programs to transition low-income black students into better schools, mostly private.

Her organization is likely to become one of the state’s partners for the scholarship program Rauner signed into law. Instead of helping roughly 60 kids each year with tuition and mentoring, she’ll be able to help many more, depending on the success of the tax credit program.

The families in her program all come from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Most of the kids are being raised by single mothers with household incomes of about $30,000 a year.

That’s whom lawmakers voted against, by the way, if they voted against the schools bill. Against a working-poor, politically powerless class of parents who are frantic to give their children a chance — a chance — at better lives than they’ve had.

Many of the donors to Buford’s program are those awful rich guys you hear about from the anti-school-choice crowd. You know, the ones who would donate to scholarship programs for poor kids, just to reduce their own tax burden.

I tell you, those rich people involved in LINK Unlimited are so miserly that they commit to mentoring a student for four years, developing lasting relationships with them, sometimes helping them get internships and jobs.

Buford tells the story of one couple who drove to different colleges with their student to help him find the right fit.

Oh, those beastly wealthy people who want to give back to society. Don't dare incentivize them to give more by creating a new tax credit.

Like I said, people who oppose scholarship tax credits must not fully understand them. I put lawmakers into that category, particularly Cassidy, whom I know to be a smart, compassionate legislator and mother. She supports public education, and she helps raise money for scholarships at the school her kids attend.

But the irony of her vote against the tax credit is that her kids’ school is one of the schools connected with LINK Unlimited.

If Cassidy really wanted more opportunity for low-income kids, she could have widened the doorway of her own school with a “yes” vote. She could have sped up the inclusion of low-income students on the tony North Side.